


Charades

by sunflowerbright



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Slight fluff, time-lord angsting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 07:48:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbright/pseuds/sunflowerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He likes it when she's in his room, because here he can almost convince himself that she is safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Charades

He likes it when she’s in his room. He doesn’t tell her this, of course: he doesn’t tell her, or anyone, much of anything about his feelings, and it’s going to stay that way.

There’s a reason it’s going to stay that way.

But he likes it when she’s in his room. He likes it when she’s on the TARDIS for that matter, but lots of people have been. Strange people, beautiful people, furry people and a robot-dog. Almost none of them have been in his room, and there’s a reason for that as well.

He likes it when she’s in his room, because this is where he stows the things dearest to him. The things that have lasted through all the regenerations - change in taste regardless. Apart from colouring, his bedroom actually stays much the same, a single constant in the ever-changing spaceship and the ever-changing Time Lord. It stays the same, because at the core, he is still pretty much the same. A scared boy, running away.

And he likes it when she’s there, in his room. The first time she is, she’s gently knocking, asking for something in the dead of night, telling him that she heard him awake or she really wouldn’t have disturbed and he can just grunt and point or whatever, she really doesn’t want to disturb…

There are ducks on her PJ’s of all things, gold hair like a halo backlit from the light in the hallway and he has said she can come in before he’s even thought about it.

She asks him about the book he’s reading and she’s sitting down on his bed and that makes it hard to concentrate, really hard, but he does, valiantly not thinking about her long, exposed legs or her fingers, wringing themselves together  over her knee, as if shy and uncertain. She doesn’t seem to be, and they talk for what seems like hours, and when she finally starts yawning so much that even he feels it’s contagious effects, he tells her to go back to her room and get some sleep, and they’ve both forgotten what she really came for.

He secretly hopes it was for his company.

He likes it when she’s in his room, and she is there more and more frequently as the days flow by. On the rare night he sleeps, she almost always come in in the morning and wakes him, tickling feathers and pokes in the shoulder, _seriously, Doctor, your snores are so loud I can hear them in the library,_ and he never tells her, but he lo – likes it when he gets to wake up to her face.

The day he likes most however, is the day she falls asleep on his bed: after spending half the night in capture and the other half running through woods and rough terrain, she is too exhausted to focus much and he checks her over in the med-bay, for scratches and bruises and poison, and he’s not taking any chances, not with her, but the anti-dote is in his room and she just shrugs, telling him it’s his choice, but if she has been poisoned and dies she will come back to haunt his arse, and he grins down at her and doesn’t admit the twinge in his heart at her words.

She’s already half-way unconscious when he administers the anti-dote, and it just looks right. Her hair is dirty, there are leaves and cobwebs in it, but for now she’s asleep and he doesn’t want her to leave: the walls of this room give off a sense of security, and he kids himself that she will be alright as long as she stays in here.

He is too worried to sleep anyway, so he spends the night with a book to read and listening to her steady breathing.

Come morning he doesn’t remember a word he’s read, but the pink flush on her cheeks when she realized where she’d woken up is ingrained in his memory forever.

So yes. He likes it when she’s in his room. He may go as far as to even say that he loves it, because… he stops the thought there. There is no point to it, because he has never told her any of this, and it is going to stay that way.

There’s a reason it’s going to stay that way.

You see…

He likes it when she’s in his room, because he can keep the illusion that she’s not going to leave him.

That is, he knows, quite pathetic.

It is also the reason she will never really know. 


End file.
